Ed Schultz's Wisconsin Campaign

Ed Schultz is the kind of shameless liberal hack who can go on air
standing in front of screaming labor-union crowds in Madison calling for
Gov. Scott Walker’s head on a platter, and then turn around and
announce that “Fox News is an arm of the Republican Party.”

Let’s put this canard to rest. In coverage of the leftist effort to
drain the taxpayers of Wisconsin for an unnecessary and doomed recall
election, Fox looks much more objective than Ed Schultz. There is no
question about that.

This
is really only a fraction of Schultz’s full-throated advocacy of the
Wisconsin union agenda. After all, he blasts away on the radio for three
hours a day. It’s his right to advocate – but not to participate in
character assassination. Both on radio and on TV, Schultz asserts that
anyone who votes for Walker “may be voting for a criminal.” Prosecutors
are investigating potential campaign improprieties while Walker was
Milwaukee County Executive, but let’s be clear: Walker has in no way
been implicated in the scandal. Schultz is slandering.

Of course, Schultz is not alone. The national news media trashed Gov.
Walker in 2011 for getting a bill passed that forced public-employee
unions to make a modest payment toward their own health insurance and
pension plans instead of having the overtaxed public foot the entire
bill. Union protests against this proposal were compared to the Arab
Spring. “Cairo moves to Madison,” cooed Diane Sawyer. The New York Times
suggested Wisconsin was “the Tunisia of collective bargaining rights.”

I could state that the unions are behaving like Gestapo thugs – but that would be uncivil wouldn’t it?

But the bill became law, and how has the Badger State fared? The Weekly
Standard humbly asked Walker’s challenger Tom Barrett – the same guy
Walker defeated in 2010 – for specifics on which school districts were
harmed by Walker’s policies. Barrett couldn’t name a single one. He
babbled about his discussions with prison guards, and couldn’t provide
any specifics at all. And they said Sarah Palin wasn’t ready for the
spotlight.

Now that Wisconsin isn’t collapsing, and in fact is seeing a dramatic
economic improvement, it’s somehow no longer Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt, and
the liberal networks have pretty much stayed away. But Schultz keeps
pounding away in a panic, lamenting that not only is Walker “the worst
governor in the country,” but that those evil Republicans and their
capitalist funders like the Koch brothers are “trying to make it so
Barack Obama doesn't get re-elected and no Democrat ever will be elected
into the White House.” Schultz warned, “There'll never be a Democratic
president in our lifetime again. And when I say in our lifetime, I'm
talking about a long, long, long, long, long time.”

Scare tactics, anyone? This guy is to talk radio what the Bill Moyers "daisy ad" was to political advertising.

Schultz will go to any minuscule point to beat up on Walker. One of my
favorites is discussing Walker’s selections for art in his home. Schultz
was all over this scandal-ette: “He reportedly has removed a portrait
of low- income children from the governor’s mansion. And he’s replaced
it with a picture of a bald eagle.” Mayday! Mayday!

Naturally, Schultz turned to one of his favorite leftist guests,
Madison writer John Nichols of The Nation magazine. Nichols claimed the
Walkers “made it quite clear to the staff that they didn’t want this
picture of these kids from Milwaukee in a prominent place in the
mansion.” Why? Nichols claimed “a lot of other folks have asked why
doesn’t this governor want to have pictures of low-income kids in the
governor’s mansion? Is it because his budget and his policies are doing
so much damage to kids like that?”

Last year, when the Democrats failed to retake the state Senate in
recall elections, Schultz didn’t wait until the returns were final on
Election Night before he hailed several times how Democrats were
“brilliant at the basics” of turning out their voters. This time, one
hopes Schultz knows that his side is doomed. The predictors at the
website Intrade are giving Walker a 95.9 percent chance of victory.

Schultz is already scheduled to join Democratic Party chair Debbie
Wasserman Schultz as a sour-grapes speaker at the Wisconsin Democratic
Convention on June 8, just as he spoke to a House Democrat retreat in
Maryland in January.

Now we return you to your regular programming, and the charge that Fox is the most partisan news channel.

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